Inclusive Recruitment

We need diverse teams to create accessible services and products

The design industry is 89.5% white and 60% male. At the same time the creative industries have had the fastest rate of growth among the Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) sectors in 2011-2017, and addressing diversity now is urgent – not only in relation to ethnicity but on the grounds of any Equal Opportunity or Diversity protected characteristic.

We tend to hire another version of ourselves

Employers generally like to stick to their comfort zone, hiring the same sort of people over and over again. Sometimes this is because networks are utilised and trusted, other times the pace of recruitment means we drop the ball on recruiting beyond the usual suspects. For whatever reason, we don’t always put diversity and inclusion at the forefront of our processes.

We’re not experts

We know that we’ve not been good enough in building a diverse team. It’s been a conversation at Snook for a while, so we’ve set out on a mission to change how we recruit. To understand how to do better, we’ve run workshops, scoured the web, and asked for help – collectively building a resource for inclusive recruitment to enable ourselves, and you, to change our policies and practices. This innovative approach has already affected the way we recruit, from writing shorter job adverts with less essential criteria to making sure we provide more information about interviews up-front to relieve anxiety.

We’ve outlined a series of stages across the recruitment process to make our insights on how to promote inclusiveness easier to digest. Many of these are small changes you can apply next time you’re looking for new team members. However, we’re under no illusion that this is as simple as making a few quick fixes to an embedded system and workplace culture.

Organisations wanting to make true change need to think holistically and long term. The key challenge is to build an inclusive company and culture, and embed this into the DNA of everything the organisation does; from arranging working hours to tackling bias. We’re starting with ourselves and would love to hear how your organisation is tackling this.